Student Legal Services wins outstanding office award

In late January, Portland State’s Student Legal Services won the Most Outstanding Student Legal Services Office Award for 2011. Tucked away on the third mezzanine level of the Smith Memorial Student Union, far from high-traffic footways and lecture halls, the small legal office goes unnoticed by many students. Moreover, many students may not even be aware of the diverse legal services offered to students, or that those services are paid for as part of the student fee.

SLS is a full legal office with three full-time attorneys versed in a variety of legal areas: civil law, landlord and tenant law, consumer law and even criminal law. Additionally, SLS offers services related to immigration law. Despite this, they have relatively low visibility around campus.

“We have to spend a lot of energy in marketing because our target audience is always changing,” SLS director and attorney Lissa Kaufman said. “As much as we try to educate students and prevent legal problems, most students don’t know that we’re here until they need us for something.”

The Outstanding Office award was given to SLS by the University Student Legal Services Association, Western Division—an organization composed of similar college and university offices in the Western region, from Washington to Texas.

The USLSA provides a means for coordinating throughout all member offices, allowing them to pool their resources. This empowers the legal service departments to direct students toward the person best able to help with their case, at times referring students to attorneys at other campuses within the region.

The SLS won this award in part due to the breadth of work it does as a result of PSU’s non-traditional campus and diverse student population. It handles a wide range of legal issues beyond those typically associated with the average 18- to 21-year-old college student. Family law, for example, accounts for nearly one quarter of all cases in the SLS.

“I think we do some things that other offices don’t do,” Kaufman said. “I think other offices steer away from doing family law because that’s a contentious area of the law; it’s a very challenging area to practice in because you’re dealing with all of the elements of a family in distress.”

Here at PSU, the SLS office has needed to be more flexible than some of its counterparts at other institutions. For example, some campus student legal offices might deal with issues relating to the same group of housing facilities or landlords. In cases such as those, legal associates and staff can develop a rapport with a specific individual or organization that might help to facilitate expedited resolutions of disputes. As the majority of PSU students live off-campus and commute from all over the Portland area, it can be much more laborious to develop the same level of rapport.

Due in part to its low visibility, the SLS places a strong focus on community outreach, providing educational events on many legal issues that PSU students may not be aware of, such as how to legally operate a bike inside the city, the rights students have as tenants and even the minutiae of employment law. Additionally, SLS, in partnership with the Pre-Law Society, also offers in-office internships and has achieved success in placing interns in jobs after completion of the program.

The SLS is currently offering free assistance in tax preparation on the weekends in the School of Business Administration. Resources for the most common legal practice areas the SLS deals with on a daily basis can be found at pdx.edu/sls/practice-areas-information.